Baltimore School Shut Down After Winning $1.5M Federal Grant

It’s a prestigious grant from the federal government worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Charter Schools across the country vie for it. Just a few get it. In 2017, one of the winning schools was in Baltimore City. But now that school is being shut down by North Avenue.

What Project Baltimore found in the school’s application is raising serious concerns about how hundreds of millions of your tax dollars are spent in Washington.

Pastor Cecil Gray is a hard man to find. Project Baltimore has been his house, his church, the two schools he runs in Baltimore City. It took us weeks, but we found him.

We tracked down Gray on behalf of taxpayers and parents like Justin Miller and Dayna White, who are worried. They have two sons at Northwood Appold Community Academy, a charter school in East Baltimore. But next month, NACA is set to shut down. City School’s Board of Commissioners did not renew its charter, even though the school received a $1.5 million federal expansion grant just one year earlier.

“I feel like it's a slap in the face to us,” White told Project Baltimore.

Now, the 162 students at NACA are scrambling to find a new school by September.

“First, we're looking for what kind of extra-curricular activities they have for my son,” said Miller as he explained the frustrating process of finding a new school. “Transportation. Test scores.”

Miller and White tell Project Baltimore they never saw this coming, until this board meeting in January.

“Underperforming? Not NACA. We have outperformed the city in every year of our existence,” Dr. Gray told the school board during the meeting. He was trying to save his school, but it didn’t work.

The board voted to shut it down 8 -1.

“I'm irate with the school,” said White.

White is angry because this wasn’t supposed to happen. In 2017, NACA won a $1.5 million expansion grant from the U.S. Department of Education. Only 17 charter schools nationwide received this grant. The Federal Government must have been impressed.

But one year later, City Schools shut it down. Project Baltimore wondered, how can that happen? So, we took a close look at NACA’s grant application to
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